Before I left my small everytown for college, my high school boyfriend would insist that the only reason I wanted to go to an Ivy League university was so that I could meet a guy who drove a Ferrari. Stupidly, I defended myself and my desire to attend a school with good academics. Yet that fall, seated in English class beside boarding school boys who ably discussed Faulkner novels I'd never heard of, I couldn't help wondering whether they really did drive $140,000 cars. Tom Perrotta, the author of "Election" and "The Wishbones," has written a smart, engaging novel about a New Jersey native trying to bridge the two worlds of Yale University and his hometown, where he helps his father drive the Roach Coach, a lunch truck. "Joe College" is funny, honest and a fabulous read, especially for anyone who's tried to fit in and let go -- and to figure out what parts of themselves to hold onto in the process. As Perrotta shows -- rich, poor, private- or public-schooled -- it's a universal identity crisis.

"Joe College" takes place during the early '80s, the years of Reagan, bloated capitalism and Hall & Oates. But unlike those wonderful John Hughes movies of the same era, in which Molly Ringwald is either the pretty, popular, wealthy girl in diamond earrings or the hard-working, dorky one from the wrong side of the tracks, Perrotta manages to see the educated elites and working-class folks as more than caricatures. And for the first time, for me anyway, the airbrushed '80s become a little bit smudged.

Danny works in the university cafeteria and from his dishwashing station he observes the difference between his townie co-workers and his prep school classmates, between himself and the hilariously right-on a cappella groups that serenade the diners. He lusts after girls who wear $5 vintage dresses and baggy sweaters and dream about Wallace Stevens, while his girlfriend Cindy from home, a secretary who didn't go to college, slips into tight designer jeans, bright new white sneakers and loads on the blue eye shadow. Her dream is to get a new car. During Danny's spring break he faces the Mafioso lunch truck bullies who threaten his father's business and his own life, but it's Cindy, surprising Danny with some bad news, who forces him to confront who he is and who he really wants to be. At one point, however, Danny admits that his life is like "a car with no brakes careening down a dangerous mountain road. Get in my way and I'll run you down."

Perrotta treats these people fairly -- no one is better or worse than anyone else, the "poor" kids don't come out on top in the end. You don't hate the rich ones. Even the elusive Jodie Foster, who attended Yale at the time and inspires gossip and lust in everyone, from Danny's Roach Coach customers to his Yalie friends, just fits. She's part of the landscape and no more special than Danny's surly, privileged friend Max, who neglects his classes to study the history of assassinations, or Lorelei, the hot New Haven cafeteria co-worker whose "greaser" brothers beat a Yalie's face in when she sleeps with him. Every character, like "Joe College" itself, is lovable, resonant and memorable.

--Suzy Hansen

Martin Bauman; or, A Sure Thing
By David Leavitt
Houghton Mifflin, 352 pages

There's something admirably gutsy about a writer breaking the literary fourth wall and allowing himself to become a character. Too often, however, the concept outshines the execution. Authors treat their fictionalized stand-ins too gently, or worse, turn them into embarrassing manifestations of their darkest neuroses. How refreshing, then, to discover a protagonist who bears a strong resemblance to his creator and is neither a saint nor a prick. And what a wicked pleasure to read a quasi-memoir so full of bittersweet remembrance and delectable literary dish.

The story will be familiar to anyone versed in the author's own career -- a young Ivy Leaguer with as much moxie as talent becomes the writing world's flavor of the week after publishing the first gay-themed story in a prestigious weekly. But as he air-kisses his way through the ranks of Manhattan publishing during the Reagan era, Martin Bauman embarks on a bumpy path in which success alternates with humiliating failure. He also falls in and out of friendships and rivalries, awakens to the growing AIDS crisis, and romances fellow writer Eli Aronson. Through it all, he's dogged by the specter of his irascible mentor, the awe- and loathing-inspiring Stanley Flint, and by the fear he'll fulfill Flint's grim prophecy: that Martin's need to please will doom him to hackdom.

Leavitt, whose own works, "Family Dancing" and "The Lost Language of Cranes," earned him early acclaim, allows his alter ego to be both painfully aware of his youthful weaknesses and amused by them as well. Martin is a bit of a stiff, throwing around 50-cent vocabulary words and Cliffs Notes literary allusions, but he's also observant, ambitious and unapologetically giddy at his heady proximity to the heavyweights of the publishing scene. Leavitt offers the right amount of '80s glitter, with characters and events so thinly disguised that even the most casual follower of literary gossip will be able to chortle in satisfied recognition.

While the recollections of an insular world nearly 20 years past may have particular resonance for the cosmopolitan literati (when was the last time a roman à clef seemed so likely to inspire eyebrow raising among the Hamptons set?), it's Leavitt's willingness to tweak himself as much as anyone else, and his gift for making his characters complicated and intriguing, no matter what degree of real life familiarity they inspire, that makes "Martin Bauman" shine. Martin may be too "eager to pounce on a sure thing" to fulfill his creative destiny, but Leavitt has the spark and gumption of a writer just hitting his stride.

--Mary Elizabeth Williams

Maya Angelou reads from "The Heart of a Woman"